Monitoring the external surface of the human body is a well established method for detecting conditions indicating illness or an increased risk of illness. For example, doctors examine patients to discover melanoma and then quickly prescribe courses of treatment for that disease. In the same way, they may discover that a patient has sun-damaged skin and prescribe that the patient avoid excessive exposure to the sun to prevent the future development of melanoma or other skin cancers. In addition, they may examine the surface topology of a woman's skin and discover a strong possibility that the woman has underlying breast cancer, so that they order further tests and appropriate treatment.
Medical examinations may be performed visually or through many kinds of medical equipment. In some cases, visual examinations may be more effective than those made by instruments, since the human eye sees both reflectance, for example color, and surface topology, for example bumps and depressions, but many mechanical instruments do not. This ability sometimes allows the eye to identify medical problems that instruments miss or cannot interpret. For example, many automated systems for medical monitoring lack the ability to analyze surface topology.
Through regular examinations, a base line of a patient's physical characteristics can be created, so that variations from that base line can be detected. One advantage of monitoring patients in this way is that early detection and treatment of illnesses and potentially dangerous conditions increases the success rates of treatments. For example, a detailed daily examination of patients' skin for signs of skin cancer could greatly increase their ability to avoid or survive skin cancer. In addition, the detection of splotches of white in people with dark skin, such as many African Americans, can indicate internal cancer. Regular examinations of skin can aid in discovering for many other illnesses and health problems, including acne, blisters, bruises, scarring, jaundice, varicose veins, and infections, and in treating them successfully.
However, the high cost of manual examinations by doctors and of examinations made with expensive medical equipment typically limits the frequency of patient monitoring. The daily monitoring of patients is typically too expensive to be conducted, except in cases where serious illnesses have already occurred and the patients have been hospitalized. General practitioners usually ask their patients to undergo general examinations only yearly, or even less frequently. Specialists also usually only see patients at widely spaced intervals, such as yearly or every six or three months. Although patients are asked to conduct self-exams more regularly, they often lack the expertise and discipline to detect medical conditions successfully. As a result, many diseases remain undetected until times when they are less susceptible to treatment.
Therefore, there is a need for an automated system and method that provides frequent medical monitoring of the external surface of the human body for characteristics of reflectance and surface topology, identifies and reports on medical problems, and, in an embodiment, treats those problems when appropriate.
In this specification, the terms “reflectance modifying agent” or “RMA” refer to any compound useful for altering the reflectance of another material, and are explained in further detail below. Some examples of RMA are inks, dyes, pigments, bleaching agents, chemically altering agents, and other substances that can alter the reflectance of human skin and other features. The terms “dye” and “transparent dyes” are used for brevity in this specification to represent any RMA.